“Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’ announcement [yesterday] at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple’s new iCloud service will allow music fans to reproduce their entire digital collections on locker-style servers accessible via 10 devices – including iPhones, iPads and computers – may not save the ravaged record industry, but it could provide a crucial new revenue stream while allowing consumers to easily consolidate their music libraries in the cloud,” Steve Knopper reports for Rolling Stone.
“The service will scan and match users’ current music collections for music carried by the iTunes store, and then make it available to all of the users’ devices by sending the songs’ metadata to the cloud,” Knopper reports. “The new iTunes iMatch [sic] service will cost $25 a year, with unlimited storage, for users to copy digital music ripped from CDs, downloaded illegally or purchased in other online stores… Syd Schwartz, a former EMI Music executive who is now a consultant to artist managers and record labels, tells Rolling Stone, ‘I’m sure someone in an executive office at a major label somewhere is going, ‘At least that’s one way we can monetize the stuff people stole from Napster over the years.””
MacDailyNews Note: iTunes Match is not “unlimited.” The limit is 25,000 songs (iTunes purchases do not count against the 25,000 song limit).
“Unlike competitors Google and Amazon, Apple has licensing deals with record labels to use their vast song catalogs by artists from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Lady Gaga in the new service,” Knopper reports. “As the world’s biggest music retailer, with longstanding label deals for iTunes, Apple had the clout to make these deals where Amazon, Google and Spotify could not. The deals allow Apple to scan a user’s hard drive for music not purchased via iTunes, then store it on servers available for access anywhere. Thus, users do not have to upload their own collections, a cumbersome and time-consuming process.”
Knopper reports, “Many in the music business predict Apple will use iCloud as a gateway to a broader subscription service, perhaps in the next few months, although Jobs did not address this point in his speech. ‘It’s a good start,’ says another music-business source. ‘If everyone in America who consumed music paid $25 to put their music in a cloud and then [iCloud] turns into a subscription-based music service – doesn’t sound bad to me. Those economics would work well for everyone.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Yes!! Apple is dragging these poor stupid horses by their teeth to the watering hole.
Thumbs-up
Wait, I am curious what Bon Jovi is gonna say about this.
What is bon jovi? Some kind of new coffee!
Unless iCloud is going to vaporize every soulless music exec, and simultaneously create legions of talented musicians, then no, iCloud will not save the music business.
Where’s the ‘like’ button?
lol!! Please let me tweet your comment!
when i rip music i often come across a situation where one cd is not in the data base that apple uses (which means i have to enter everything) or the album title is not the same or the composer is listed as the artist (for classical music) or the titles aren’t right, etc., and i manually change the text for my itunes data base. so what happens if itunes tries to correlate my stuff with what they have access to? i have already seen that itunes does a terrible job of correlating cds with cover art; i have stopped even showing the cover art because sometimes itunes just “sees” greatest hits or something in the title and appears to find something at random with those same words and i get a ricky nelson (for example) album cover for something completely different.
It is much more likely that iTunes Match will use audio fingerprinting technology (like Shazam!) to analyse songs and try to match the sound with their catalogue. Regardless of you entered in the meta data of your music, iTunes would then identify the track as it is originally titled in their iTunes store and make it available to you (while you’re a subscriber).
One more thing; iTunes currently uses rather efficient, but imprecise, service called GraceNote, for identifying audio CDs upon insertion into the drive. This database is driven largely by user submissions, which often makes it inaccurate.
iTunes Store uses album/artist/composer/track names as defined by the label that owns the recording. Therefore, iTunes Match will rename your songs/tracks in accordance with the publisher’s proper names.
even the label must have some (poorly paid) person enter the data, because you will see the titles, etc. sometimes all lower case, sometimes all upper case, misspellings, etc. and even sometimes the track names are switched around and in general not match the liner notes that come with the cd. i have around 2,800 itunes songs and 17,000 from cds so the itunes songs are a small part of my collection (and becoming a smaller part every month) so i have had some experience with itunes since the beginning. i would not be happy if the music on my hard drive had its associated text renamed to what the publisher thinks are the proper names. if they can do sound matching then i would think they would just leave the associated text alone. some popular music has multiple versions – at least album and singles and sometimes live versions. i try to keep these sorted out since they aren’t really duplicates even though itunes tries to tell me sometimes that they are. i think we will just have to wait and see how well apple does this and hope that cover art matching is not representative of what they can do!
I think there will be a fundamental difference between the way iTunes identifies CDs (and fetches cover art) today, and the way iTunes Match is supposed to work.
Unlike data on CDDB and Gracenote (user-driven, therefore, mostly sloppy and inacurate), data on iTunes Store is exactly as the publisher intended (having gone through numerous proof-reading cycles). It is exactly like physical copy of the CD liner notes. The cases where an artist has issued several ever so slightly different releases of the same track are an exception. As for live vs. studio releases, I have no doubt that the audio fingerprinting can effortlessly tell the difference between the two.
It may be exactly the way the recording label entered it, but it’s not always right. I bought a “2 disc set” from iTunes and every single track name was wrong!
The only one to blame for wrong names in iTunes is the label that published the disc. Exactly the same as with physical discs. I’m not quite sure I understand how can the track name be “wrong” if that is how they appear on the original CD liner notes? I can understand when some lame jazz wannabe-artist puts his CD on CDBaby, and on that CD, he has some popular jazz standards, which he grossly mistyped (Stella by Starlite, Autumn leafs, etc), but the point is, the iTunes Store is always identical to the original CDs; otherwise, the label that published it is dong an incredibly lousy job.
I bought that same damn set or a different one from the same idiots. It took an hour of copying and pasting to get things fixed.
yes, disposableidentity, that is what i have experienced, too, throughout itunes history. as long as they don’t try to change the text associated with the music on my hard drive i don’t care though.
So, if I pay the $25 and get my music that was ripped from CD’s and my illegal stuff off Napster/Limewire, etc. in iCloud, do any of those files disappear when I don’t renew next year?
Or, is this like a $25 one time amnesty solution?
It is NOT a one-time $25 “amnesty solution”. When you pay $25, for the next one year, you will be allowed to identify all your non-iTunes music and have it available to all of your iDevices. Those that couldn’t be identified will be uploaded. Once the track identification (and upload) is complete, you’ll be able to delete local copies of those songs and then download (actually, sync) official iTunes copies (cleanly encoded in AAC 256kbsp, complete with cover all art) to any and all of your iDevices. If you cancel that subscription, the only music that will remain in the cloud will be the tracks you bought from iTunes; the rest will disappear from the could. They will NOT, however, disappear from your iDevices; anything that you downloaded back to your device stays there. So, the only difference between what you had before (bunch of ripped or torrented MP3 files by Artist, named Track 04) will be that now you’ll have all of those same songs, only they’ll be in AAC, properly named, with cover art.
That’s my question too, especially since the $25 is an annual fee. I suspect (and hope) that you’d lose access to all the copied/mirrored music on all of your other devices, but your original files would remain in place. (I noticed the Rolling Stone author didn’t pick up on the 25,000-song limit (not counting iTunes purchases) to the new service.)
If you do not renew your $25 storage/matching system, your non-iTunes songs will disappear from iCloud, but you will still have files on your devices. Remember, you aren’t streaming music from iCloud, you are distributing files to devices.
BUT, then all your files will be legit iTunes files that don’t require iTunes Match.
My understanding is that it is an annual fee. If you do not renew, your ability to access those songs on other mobile devices via iCloud will “disappear”. Of course, you could still sync the files on your hard drive to your mobile device the old fashioned way.
For a bunch of my music iTunes cannot find the cover art. So I doubt this new service will work there.
However, I can copy & paste the artwork from Amazon.
The current solution for finding artwork in iTunes relies on the track, album and artist names derived from CDDB and Gracenote. These rely on user submissions, so the accuracy is rather poor. Unless there is an absolute match with the iTunes Store, artwork cannot be found.
If the new iTunes Match system uses audio fingerprinting (Shazam!), it will ALWAYS be able to find a match, as long as the recording exists in the iTunes Store (and likelihood of that is pretty high).
So, we can do some math here. If a person has a bunch of music they acquired outside of iTunes (via various means…), they have to figure out what is better:
1. Subscribe to $25 per year indefinitely (possibly $750-1,000 for the life of the technology), or;
2. Buy legitimate copies of all that music from iTunes and have it forever.
Obviously, under the assumptions of 30-40 years for the life expectancy of the technology, buying would only work if the total number of tracks is well below 1,000; otherwise, “renting” this space for your music is cheaper.
It is remarkable how Apple was able to strong-arm all the major four (especially Universal) into this kind of a deal. Perhaps they were hoping to eventually get a real subscription deal; after all, their bean counters have been salivating (and having wet dreams) about digital music subscription model for many years now…
Stop using reason to justify Apple.
I’m much better off staying blind and whining about how “I already paid for my music, now Apple wants to charge me for it again because I didn’t buy it from them!”
No, they don’t want to charge you again for your music. They want to charge you for the service of uploading your music and making it available to you on the go on your other iDevices. If you’re happy enough syncing your device to iTunes directly, then you won’t need this service.
The $25 buys you the convenience of accessing your entire library, from anywhere, anytime.
Think about it, nothing or something. Then the something becomes a lot more attractive. With Napster/Limeware, they got nothing. Now, at least, they get something annually.
“Many in the music business predict Apple will use iCloud as a gateway to a broader subscription service…”
Stop with the fucking subscription thing, assclowns. (Yes, I know iTunes Match is an annual fee, but they mean $X/mo for umlited access to all iTunes tracks). These are the same suits that have been wanting subscription services forever. Unfortunately, as of right now, people still like buying music. If that were not the case, any of the subscription services would be a major player and hurting iTunes. I do not see any signs that such a thing is true.
Apple does something innovative (iTunes, iPhone, etc) and are successful. All the executurds that they beat in this game then start predicting that Apple will do exactly what they got beat doing. “Ooooh, I know, subscriptions for music on devices with slide out keyboards! And in various sizes that don’t make any sense!”
Agree; Jobs said it long time ago that subscription is quite pointless thing for by far most of people, and, as far as I am concerned, he is still right about it.
There will be hardly ever subscription service from Apple.
Do all you folks really have a bunch of tracks by Artist and named track 1, track 2, etc?
Wow- I must have too much time on my hands, as I’ve gone through my music collection and made sure that all album names, all album art, all artist names, and all track names are correct, with very, very few exceptions.
yes, that is what i do, and it does take a lot of time and i don’t want all that work overwritten, which is why i am hoping at least on my “original” hard drive the text won’t be changed. i am not sure what they will do with the other devices though – i am afraid they will get the track 1, etc. treatment.
Whoa!! I hadn’t even thought of that. Might give it a try but last time I looked at my vinyl collection I was horrified that I ever listed to some of that SH#$T
Neat stuff. It means if I digitize all my vinyl albums with noise and scratches I can get the remastered stuff for just $25?
Forget John-Paul II, start the canonization of St. Steve!
Better if I reply to the right post.
Whoa!! I hadn’t even thought of that. Might give it a try but last time I looked at my vinyl collection I was horrified that I ever listed to some of that SH#$T